Sunday, September 07, 2008

There are problems that are prevalent across humanity, common to the human condition, such as "I'm hungry" or "my father is a dick", and then there are those problems that are what my friend Pablo calls "First world problems".

That's what this blog post is about: a first world problem.

My cleaning lady is an idiot.

I've written about her before. We had the world's best cleaning lady/couple for many years until they expanded their business and brought in a helper. The "helper" is not... uh... so helpful.

In the past, back when Perfecta, our original cleaning lady, cleaned our house and we couldn't find something, we'd realize that Perfecta had just found a better place for it. She'd make slight modifications to how our house was organized and they were generally improvements. Cleaning supplies would get logically grouped, glassware would be attractively arranged, and everything else would just be artful. We'd just have to think logically (or aesthically) and we'd find whatever we were looking for. Nice!

With the new lady things are just mysterious. Where are the coffee filters? Who knows. My daughter's eye patch? Ugh, no clue.

So far we've only found one systematic method to her madness. She loves to store things vertically. Anything that can be stored upright will be stored upright. Tall and thin devices are almost guaranteed to be st0red in something upright and marginally taller.

Meat thermometer? Stored upright in the thermos.

French press coffee plunger? In the cocktail shaker! (not stirred!)

It's irrelevant that these "storage" devices are not actually storage devices and are rarely used and opaque. She utilizes them like normal humans use shelves and drawers.

Back before we had figured out her system, we just assumed she had been raised by wolves. Everything was so random and wild! It was like camping, but in our kitchen. Now that we've discerned her methodology, we're left pondering her motivation.

Our best theory so far is that she lives in a verrrry tall apartment where horizontal space is nonexistant. The idea of storing something NEXT to something else must be completely foreign to her. Instead, all things must be stored in or on top of other things.

Theoretically, with a tall enough space, you could store a life's worth of items entirely in and on top of each other, with a footprint of maybe a microwave.